The Goodman double murder
The Goodman double murder was the shooting deaths of Stanley Eric Goodman and his wife, Terri Sue Lawson Goodman, as they slept inside their Huntsville home on May 20, 2000. Hubert Glenn Sexton Jr. was convicted of their murders and was originally sentenced to death. The death sentence was later overturned and he is serving a life sentence.
Prelude to murder
Hubert Glenn Sexton Jr. and Terri Sue Lawson had three children together. Later, Sexton married Sherry Sexton and Lawson married Stanley Goodman. The Sextons lived with the Goodmans at the Goodmans’ mobile home in Huntsville for a period of time before the Sextons left the home and relocated to Cleveland, Tenn. Two of the children made the move with the Sextons.
Sexual abuse allegations
In March 2000, one of Goodman’s children who lived with the Sextons, an 8-year-old girl, accused Glenn Sexton of sexually abusing her. The investigation was initiated by TN Dept. of Children’s Services case workers in Scott County, where the allegations were made. Sexton was interviewed by a DCS case worker in Bradley County, Tenn., but the investigation resulted in no charges being filed.
On May 16, 2000, DCS case workers in Bradley County received a report from Black Fox Elementary School in Cleveland that the 8-year-old girl had told authorities there that her stepfather had molested her again the previous night. Sexton was accused of forcing the girl to perform oral sex on him, telling her that if she refused she would never see her father again. This time, law enforcement authorities accompanied DCS to the Sextons’ home and removed three children from the home: two of Goodman’s children and Sexton’s child from a previous marriage.
Sexton denied the allegations, and told authorities that Goodman was angry that he and his wife had moved out of the home in Scott County, taking two of Goodman’s three children with them. He contended that Goodman had coerced the child into making up allegations against him, and claimed that Goodman had called him several weeks earlier and played an audio recording of Goodman coaching the girl to make allegations against Sexton.
When the DCS case worker told Sexton that if he was guilty of abusing the girl he should confess and get treatment, Sexton is accused of saying “Well, I can go over and sign papers saying I did it and serve two or three years in jail and we can be a family again.”
A deputy sheriff at the home that day overheard Sexton saying that he “was not going to jail for a child abuse charge … if I go to jail for anything it would be for murder.”
Meanwhile, Goodman was informed of the child sex abuse investigation in Cleveland, and told law enforcement there that he intended to file a petition seeking custody of the children.
Later, it was revealed that Sexton had told his accountant in Scott County in the Spring of 2000 that if Goodman tried to take one of the children living with the Sextons that he would “blow his … brains out.”
He is also accused of telling his babysitter — with whom he was having an affair — that he would kill “that bastard in Scott County” over the allegations of child sex abuse.
The murders
On Saturday, May 20 — four days after the children were removed from the Sexton home — Sexton was working on a construction site when he told a coworker about the allegations. He again denied that they were true, and told the coworker — Preston Adams — that he “was not going to let (Goodman) come down (to Cleveland) before he took care of that.”
At around 2:30 p.m. that afternoon, Sexton visited a Dollar General store in Cleveland, where he spent $10.83 to purchase a fleece shirt and pants.
At around 6 p.m. that evening, Sexton visited a friend — Clinton Daniel Mason — at an auto repair shop where Mason worked and asked for a .22 long rifle that Sexton owned and Mason had possession of. Mason retrieved the rifle from the home of his mother and gave it to Sexton.
At 3:30 a.m., Mason visited the Sexton home, where he found Sexton apparently drunk and his wife upset. Hours later, over breakfast at a Denny’s restaurant, Sexton told Mason that he had killed Goodman and his wife.
In Scott County, Stanley Goodman’s 13-year-old daughter who lived with them was gone to the races at Scenic Raceway with her aunt — Goodman’s sister. The races were canceled due to rain, and the daughter returned home early, around 10 a.m. or 11 a.m. The lights were off when she arrived; her father’s bedroom door was closed. She retrieved a bag of coffee from the kitchen for her aunt, then went to bed.
It wasn’t until the next morning, when the girls awoke and went to check on them, that she discovered her father and stepmother dead in their bed. Authorities were summoned to the scene, and an investigation began.
Detectives at the Scott County Sheriff’s Office initially discovered six spent cartridges from a .22 caliber rifle, and later discovered three more. It was determined that Stanley Goodman had been shot four times in the face and once in the arm. One of the bullets had destroyed his eye, and one had severed his spinal cord. His wife had been shot three times in the face and once in the ear.
The investigation
Suspicion almost immediately centered on Sexton. A detective at the Bradley County Sheriff’s Office was contacted by authorities in Scott County, and spoke to the Sextons on the day of Sunday, May 21. Sexton gave consent for police to search his home and vehicle. Authorities found a receipt from the Dollar General inside the vehicle.
On Monday, May 22, his coworker would later testify, Sexton visited Adams at the hotel room where Adams was staying. There, he confessed to killing the Goodmans as they slept, saying that he had purchased clothes from the Dollar General, which he had burned afterward, along with the wooden stock of his rifle. He buried what remained of the gun, he told Adams. He also said he had worn oversized shoes to throw detectives off track if they found shoe prints at the scene of the murders, and that he had changed the tires on his vehicle.
Mason, the friend who worked at the auto repair shop, told police that Sexton had bought two tires at his shop.
On May 24, Sexton’s wife called police, upset. Bradley County authorities and the TBI met her so she could give her statement.
The following day, May 25, Christy Swallows — the neighbor and babysitter that Sexton was having an affair with — told investigators that Sexton had shown up at her home on May 21, banging on doors and windows and in a frantic state. He told her that his wife had left him and her car was at the police station. When she asked him if he had killed the Goodmans, he allegedly admitted to “blowing them son of a bitches full of holes.”
Sexton was arrested that same day and charged with two counts of first degree murder.
Trial and appeal
At trial, Sexton presented just one witness on his behalf — a law student who tried to establish that it would take too long for Sexton to make the trip from Cleveland to Huntsville and back in the amount of time he was unaccounted for.
A jury deliberated only shortly before finding Sexton guilty of killing the Goodmans. He was sentenced to death for each of the murders. Eighth Judicial District Attorney General William Paul Phillips had announced before the trial that he intended to seek the death penalty, based on the allegations that the murders were committed to prevent the prosecution of child sexual abuse charges against Sexton.
The sentences were handed down on June 30, 2021. On July 30, 2021, Sexton filed his first appeal. The original sentence was upheld by the 8th Judicial District Criminal Court, and later by the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals.
Eventually, though, the appeal reached the Tennessee Supreme Court, which in 2012 overturned the death sentence but upheld the murder convictions. The basis for overturning the death sentence was based on several findings of improprieties at the original trial, including an improper striking of jurors, prejudicial error in the admission of evidence, and improper comments by prosecutors during the opening statement and closing arguments. The case was remanded to the 8th Judicial District Criminal Court for a new sentencing hearing, at which point it was announced that the state would no longer seek the death penalty.
On Jan. 14, 2022, Sexton was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
At trial, witnesses testified on Sexton’s behalf that his parents had divorced when he was six, and that he lived with neither of them after that, having only little contact with them. It was said that his mother left his father for another man, taking his brother with her, and that his father was in poor health and was forced to give up his family. The entire episode, witnesses said, traumatized Sexton, and he lived in 26 different residences before turning 18.
Sexton is serving his sentence at Northeast Correctional Facility in Mountain City, Tenn.